Robert Farley

Via Jeffrey Lewis, Katherine Shrader has an excellent article on the legendary “suitcase nuke.” Long story short, such a weapon may never have existed, and because of technical limitations would have had a very short shelf life in any case. Members of Congress have warned about the dangers of suitcase nuclear weapons. Hollywood has made […]

Ted Kennedy and Max Cleland wrote an Armistice Day post at Danger Room in which they point out the workplace difficulties facing returning veterans. In reference to a 1994 law intended to ensure that the seniority and benefits of veterans would be protected, Kennedy and Cleland write: Today, however, the federal government is failing in […]

Erik Loomis has a fine post on Obama’s kowtow to the mining lobby in Nevada: Obama claims, ”What is clear to me is that the legislation that has been proposed places a significant burden on the mining industry and could have a significant impact on jobs.” This is hogwash. Obama is simply repeating typical industry […]

Via Danger Room, CQ Politics is reporting that: The FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian […]

It’s election day in Kentucky, and Ernie Fletcher is about to become a lame duck. In general, it’s a good idea to be following Bluegrass Roots, Ditch Mitch, Bluegrass Report, and Hillbilly Report. All of them should be blogging all day and into the evening. In addition to reporting on the robo-calls purporting to be […]

Folks have probably seen the reports of two pirate attacks off Somalia in the last couple of weeks. In one, a group of pirates attacked a North Korean flagged ship and were fought off by the crew, with the assistance of a US Navy destroyer (piracy makes strange bedfellows). In another attack, pirates successfully seized […]

While there has been some fabulous blogging in Left Blogistan about developments in Pakistan, a lot of bloggers (including myself) have preferred to stand back, in large part because we have nothing useful to contribute to the discussion. One of the differences between Right and Left Blogistan is that lefty bloggers both a) defer to […]

Defense Tech has a pair of posts up about the reconstruction of air forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the reconstruction is proceeding as you might expect; Soviet trained Afghan pilots are being brought back into the service to fly older models of available helicopters, with an eye towards increasing the mobility and firepower […]

To further follow up on Matt’s post and Spencer’s article, I’d like to bring us back to this post by Marc Lynch: I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday (among three people who have never discussed the issue before, and from much of a very knowledgeable and experienced audience based on post-session […]

Somali pirates have been more active of late, and have recently seized a Japanese-owned chemical tanker. Piracy off the Horn of Africa dropped precipitously in the six months preceding the Ethiopian invasion, but has (predictably) increased since. Piracy is a problem that is essentially driven by failed states; even in areas of multiple, overlapping, and […]